BIGGLES OF THE INTERPOL

by Captain W. E. Johns

2. THE MAN WHO LOST HIS FOOT (Pages 46 – 68)

“Biggles looked up from his desk as the door of the Air Police office opened and a man walked in. His face was thin and chalky white, and in it his eyes looked unnaturally large and bright. His lips quivered as he said: “Hello, Biggles”. Staring, Biggles half rose and sank down again. “Am I supposed to know you?” he asked. (My first edition has the “I” of that sentence missing, with a blank space where the “I” should be). “Of course you know me. I’m Nobby Donovan of 24 Squadron”. Biggles’ eyes opened wide. “Sorry. I wouldn’t have known you. What on earth have you been doing to yourself?” Nobby, who is an ex-pilot, tells Biggles he is going to “bash a brick through a jeweller’s window” as he wants to go to prison. “What you want,” returned Biggles slowly, “is a hospital”. Nobby explains “I’m a dope fiend”. He tells Biggles he was hit in the Battle of Britain and they had to take his foot off and give him an artificial one. From then onwards he has suffered from pain from the foot he hasn’t got as the nerves are still there. Doctors had given him pills to take the edge off the agony and they helped a bit. One day Nobby went into a chemist and was given some white powder. “It was miraculous. It acted like a charm. For the first time in years I was really free from pain”. It cost him “three quid” but it was worth it. (Three quid would have been sixty shillings. This first edition book cost eight and a half shillings when it was published in 1957). Nobby didn’t ask what it was but now believes it must have been heroin. Next time Nobby had the pain he went for more and he caught the habit. “I just had to have the stuff”. “The crafty devil who was supplying the stuff knew all about that, so he raised the price. Said it was hard to get”. Nobby is now flat broke and going out of his mind. Nobby says the man selling the stuff is called Valesid. “I imagine he’s Greek. Runs a little chemist’s shop in a back street near Paddington station”. Biggles asks “You didn’t by any chance come to see me hoping I’d give you money so that you could make a bee-line for Paddington –” “No,” broke in Donovan. “Definitely not. I’ll take my oath”. Biggles picks up a newspaper and studies the adverts. “There’s a cargo boat leaving in the morning for Fremantle, Western Australia, with a few cabins vacant. It’ll take you six weeks to get there. You won’t find any dope on the ship and if you can hold out for six weeks you’ll be cured. I’ll buy you a ticket if you’ll swear not to step off the ship at any intermediate port”. Nobby says “I’ll accept and repay you from the first money I earn”. “You’ll have a tough time”, Biggles tells him. “If I can’t stick it I can always jump overboard”. Biggles asks for more details about the “dope shop” and is told the dope reaches it in a Rolls-Royce as twice Nobby has seen a Rolls pull up and a woman get out. “She has a uniformed chauffeur, a coloured man who looks as if he might be an Egyptian. The dame herself is dark and well-dressed; maybe a bit too well-dressed”. On one occasion, Nobby has been to the shop and been told they were out of stock and told to come back in half an hour. He saw the Rolls come and when it had gone, the shop had the stuff again. Nobby didn’t think to take the number of the car. Biggles asks why Nobby didn’t report this to the police earlier. He is told there are two reasons, he didn’t want to cut off his supplies and secondly, “He told me that if I squealed the gang would get me. That could be true, because I often saw sinister dago-looking types hanging about”. Algy is sent to go with Donovan to get the ticket, give him some lunch and take him to the flat until the ship sails. Ginger comments that it seems strange a man of his calibre can’t break himself of a habit. “Of all narcotics heroin is probably the worst,” answered Biggles. “It not only destroys a man’s body but his soul. Habit? Addicts who have had the drug withheld have been known to go out of their minds. What about cigarettes? Nicotine is a mild narcotic, and like the rest is habit forming. Every time the price of cigarettes goes up thousands of people give up smoking. Can they stick it? No. Within a week or two most of them are smoking again. Multiply that smoking habit a hundred times and you’ll get an idea of what a grip a real drug gets on you. In spite of severe penalties drugs have rotted the entire Middle East, which is the centre of the dope racket. The trouble about stopping it is the enormous profits hanging to the traffic. A pound weight of heroin, costing only a matter of shillings to manufacture, can retail at four or five hundred pounds”. Biggles explains that “Heroin is an alkaloid derived from the opium poppy. The coagulated juice taken from the seed-pod is opium. Treated with certain chemicals it becomes morphine. Treated again with anhydride of acetic acid it is converted into a white powder, diacetyl morphine, otherwise heroin”. “So all you need to get it is to grow the right sort of poppy,” put in Bertie Lissie. “Correct. This particularly poppy is a plant with grey-green foliage and single mauve flowers. The best comes from the high ground in Asia Minor”. Biggles calls Inspector Gaskin and asks him to come to his office. He then tells the Inspector the story. Biggles wants to get the people behind the operation and asks the Inspector to watch the shop for the Rolls. A week later, the Inspector reports that Rolls belongs to an Egyptian-Greek named Arbram Nifar, with a house in Hill Street, Mayfair. He’s a high class Turkish and Egyptian cigarette importer. His wife does most of the running about with an Egyptian chauffeur called Ali. “We’ve traced the car to shops in Paddington, Soho, Limehouse and Mayfair. There four seem to be the lot. Nifar and his wife spend the week-ends out of Town. Seems they’ve got a farm in Devon. Probably one of these tax-dodging set-ups. I can’t imagine him farming for any other reason”. “Unless the farm comes into the dope racket,” suggested Biggles. “It could be to that address the importer delivers the stuff. He may think a London house is too dangerous”. Biggles says he will run down to Devon and cast an eye over the farm from ground level. Biggles asks Ginger to get the car as it is Saturday and the husband and wife should be down there. He askes Algy and Bertie to go with them as well as there will be a lot of ground to cover.

“It was late in the afternoon when the police car cruised through the quiet Devon village that was the postal address of Nifar’s farm. A boy directed them to it and they were soon moving slowly down one of those sunken roads so common in the country. With the banks ten or twelve feet high nothing could be seen beyond the hedges that topped them. Ginger is sent up the bank to look around but reports only seeing a field of beans with a barbed wire fence round the perimeter. The find an entrance gate with a farm cottage to one side. “A coloured man was working in the garden. “This is a private road,” he said shortly, with a thick foreign accent”. Driving round, there is only this one entrance and the barbed wire fence is always there. Biggles says they will return to London and the next day fly down with a camera. They then have to pull in tight to the bank to allow a Rolls-Royce to pass. Biggles drops Algy and Bertie off to keep an eye on the gate until tomorrow and asks them to ring his flat at six o’clock tomorrow morning to report what they have seen. “The car returned to London without incident”.

At six the following morning, Algy reports that not a soul has entered or left the place. Two hours later Biggles flies a police Proctor aircraft straight over the farm whilst Ginger takes photographs. There must be twenty acres of beanfield. Biggles is surprised when he notices something. “No. It couldn’t be”. Then he tells Ginger “Take a good look at the beanfield. You’ll notice two pale stripes running across it. They stop well inside the field on both sides. There are some men working in them”. “What about them?” asks Ginger. “What do you make those stripes to be?” (“What do you make those stripes to be?” is the illustration opposite page 60). Biggles says “You’ll think I’m crazy, and I may be, but the only place I’ve seen crops looking like that is in the Middle East”. He adds “An opium farm right on our doorstep. No wonder the Customs people were baffled. For sheer brass face this is the tops”. They fly back to base then take the car to Kew. At the offices of the Royal Horticultural Society, Biggles shows his police pass and asks to see a specimen of the opium poppy and he is shown the Papaver Somniferum. Biggles asks if the plant would grow in this country as he is interested in the possible production of opium taking place and is told “No doubt a warmer climate would be more likely to produce a higher opium content than a cold one. The drug, as you probably know, is derived from the seed pod, or rather, the sap that oozes from when it is scratched, and I imagine it would flow more freely in a warm place than a cold one”. Biggles asks if the plant would thrive in Devonshire and is told “I see no reason why it shouldn’t”.

“It was late in the afternoon when the car arrived back at the Devon rendezvous, where, as there was no longer any point in Algy and Bertie continuing their task, they were relieved and taken to the village inn for a substantial high tea. They still had nothing to report, so Biggles told them the result of his day’s work. “Sizzling sausages!” exclaimed Bertie. “What will people get up to next?”. Algy asks Biggles how he got onto it so quickly. “That was merely a matter of that useful thing called experience,” answered Biggles. “When I saw those stripes in the beanfield it touched off a chord in my memory. Years ago, when the R.A.F. was in Egypt, although I never did the job myself, there was a regular patrol on the look-out for poppies, the growing of which was illegal”. Biggles says the next move it to get a sample. Bertie asks what they will do if it is opium poppies being grown. Biggles says “We can clean up here after we’ve dealt with the agents who distribute the stuff in London. When we’ve checked that the plants are what I think they are we’ll get back to Town and leave Gaskin and his plain-clothes men to do the mopping up. The thing is to get the whole gang into the bag with one cast of the net. Nothing we do pleases me more than to jump on these drug traffickers. Every one of ‘em is a potential murderer – a slow murderer of the vilest kind”. With Algy driving the car, Biggles and Ginger are dropped off and climb up a bank. Using a roll of aircraft fabric bought specifically for the purpose, they fold it treble over the barbed wire fence and climb over “without injury to themselves or their clothes”. Ginger trips over a wire and they hear the barking of dogs. Biggles guesses it must be an alarm. They make their way to the plants and Biggles cuts one near the root. They hasten back to the fence and two mastiff dogs come rushing up, snarling. They both scramble over the barbed wire fence, with Biggles removing the fabric before the dogs can get them, but it is close. They get in the car and Algy says that Nifar will know someone has been in the field. Biggles says he may think the alarm was caused by a poacher. Stopping under a village lamp-post, Biggles examines the plant he has taken and points out some cuts in a seed pod from which a white latex still oozed. “That’s what those fellows were doing in the field. Harvesting the dope. It’s all we need to know”. Biggles walks to a call-box outside the village post-office and rings Gaskin. He returns after ten minutes. “I had a job to make Gaskin believe I wasn’t fooling,” he explained. “A dope factory in Devon does sound a bit far-fetched, I must admit. So do a lot of things these days, if it comes to that. Let’s push on home. There’s no particular hurry. Gaskin says he’ll have everything under control long before we’re there”.

“What Arbran Nifar and his wife thought about the night alarm in Devon, if they thought about it at all, was never known, but it may be supposed that, judging from their behaviour, they did not take it seriously”. They stayed on at the farm until late the next morning, and when the Rolls arrived back at the house in Mayfair, Gaskin and Biggles are there to confront them. Gaskin and Biggles ask to search their suitcases and Nifar denies they are his saying “They belong to a friend of mine”. They find a number of small, neat, brown-paper parcels. Some carried a name only, others an address as well, as if intended for posting”. One is opened to reveal, in neatly folded paper, a quantity of fine white powder. Nifar and his wife say nothing but the chauffeur is persuaded to talk. People come and collect them, he says, and he delivers the others in the Rolls. The chauffeur is sent off to make his deliveries with two plain-clothes men who will “collect these rats as they take delivery”. The police then wait for the others to call. “And so it worked out. Never was a round-up more complete. As each drug peddler arrived, and accepted his packet from Nifar, he was arrested by Gaskin’s men who, for that purpose, had been placed where they could not be seen. They stepped out when the transaction was completed. Some of the pedlars came in expensive motor-cars, but they all left in the police van”. In due course, the gang, which included the foreign workers on the ‘farm’, appeared before a judge to receive heavy prison sentences. “If Nobby Donovan ever gets to hear of this he should reckon he got his own back on a bunch of crooks who nearly drove him to suicide,” opined Ginger, when there were back in the Air Police office. “I hope he’ll think it was worth losing a foot to do the country the best service anyone has done it since the time he lost his,” answered Biggles soberly. “He should also, now that the dope is no longer available, have solved a problem for a lot of other people who had landed themselves in the same mess as he had”.